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22-letter words containing i, o, a

  • lady's not for burning — a verse play (1948) by Christopher Fry.
  • lake isle of innisfree — a poem (1893) by W. B. Yeats.
  • land of milk and honey — a land of unusual fertility and abundance.
  • land of the rising sun — Japan.
  • large magellanic cloud — a satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way galaxy, appearing as a hazy cloud in the southern constellations Dorado and Mensa.
  • last call optimisation — (programming)   (Or "tail call optimisation") Discarding the immediate calling context (call stack frame) when the last action of a function or procedure, A, is to call another function or procedure, B. B will then return directly to A's caller, or possibly further up the call stack if the optimisation has been applied to several consecutive calls. Last call optimisation allows arbitrarily deep nesting of procedure calls without consuming memory to store useless environments. This is particularly useful in the special case of tail recursion optimisation, where a procedure's last action is to call itself (possibly indirectly).
  • law of excluded middle — the principle that any proposition must be either true or false.
  • leather-stocking tales — a series of historical novels by James Fenimore Cooper, comprising The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer.
  • left-handed compliment — an ambiguous compliment
  • let sth drop/fall/slip — If you let drop, let fall, or let slip information, you reveal it casually or by accident, during a conversation about something else.
  • liberal democrat party — The Liberal Democrat Party is the third largest political party in Britain and the main centre party. It believes in improving the constitution and the voting system and in providing good welfare services.
  • life of samuel johnson — a biography (1791) by James Boswell.
  • like a bat out of hell — very fast
  • linear induction motor — an electric motor in which a movable part moves in a straight line, with power being supplied by a varying magnetic field set up by a fixed part of the system, as a metal rail on the ground.
  • little lord fauntleroy — (italics) a children's novel (1886) by Frances H. Burnett.
  • local exchange carrier — (communications)   (LEC) A company allowed to handle local calls following the break-up of the Bell system in the US by anti-trust regulators. These vary from Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOC) through to small independents such as Farmers Cooperative. Local exchange carriers are not allowed to handle long-distance traffic. This is handled by inter-exchange carriers (IXC) who are not allowed to handle local calls.
  • lord justice of appeal — an ordinary judge of the Court of Appeal
  • lorentz transformation — the mathematical transformation in the special theory of relativity that describes the way in which measurements of space, time, and other physical quantities differ for two observers in uniform relative motion.
  • love-hate relationship — If you have a love-hate relationship with someone or something, your feelings towards them change suddenly and often from love to hate.
  • lower canada rebellion — an uprising of 1837, quickly crushed by the British militia, against the British colonial administration in Quebec.
  • lunar excursion module — lunar module. Abbreviation: LEM.
  • magnetic concentration — beneficiation of crushed ore in which a magnetic mineral is separated from gangue by means of a magnetic field.
  • magnetic dipole moment — a measure of the magnetic strength of a magnet or current-carrying coil, expressed as the torque per unit magnetic-flux density produced when the magnet or coil is set with its axis perpendicular to the magnetic field
  • magnetic pole strength — Electricity. a measure of the force exerted by one face of a magnet on a face of another magnet when both magnets are represented by equal and opposite poles. Symbol: m.
  • make a beeline for sth — If you make a beeline for a place, you go to it as quickly and directly as possible.
  • make a big deal out of — to attach extreme importance to; make a big fuss about
  • make common cause with — join forces
  • make contact (with sb) — If you make contact with someone, you find out where they are and talk or write to them.
  • make out like a bandit — a robber, especially a member of a gang or marauding band.
  • make/prove one's point — If you make your point or prove your point, you prove that something is true, either by arguing about it or by your actions or behaviour.
  • manner of articulation — the degree of obstruction or the type of channel imposed upon the passage of air at a given place of articulation, as denoted by such categories as stop, fricative, nasal, and semivowel.
  • master warrant officer — a noncommissioned officer in the Canadian forces junior to a chief warrant officer
  • mathematical induction — induction (def 5).
  • matrix math extensions — (processor)   (MMX) (NOT an acronym for "MultiMedia eXtension", according to Intel, but an Intel brand name) A set of 57 extra instructions built into some versions of Intel's Pentium microprocessors for supporting SIMD operations on multimedia and communications data types. MMX-enhanced processors are due to be released early in 1997. They will be fully compatible with previous Intel processors and software but software will only benefit if it is written to use the new instructions. They can handle many common multimedia operations, such as digital signal processing, normally handled by a separate sound card or video card.
  • maxwell air force base — U.S. Air Force installation in SE central Alabama, NW of Montgomery: site of U.S. Air Force Advanced School.
  • mechanical ventilation — life-support provided by respirator
  • memory management unit — (hardware, memory management)   (MMU, "Paged Memory Management Unit", PMMU) A hardware device or circuit that supports virtual memory and paging by translating virtual addresses into physical addresses. The virtual address space (the range of addresses used by the processor) is divided into pages, whose size is 2^N, usually a few kilobytes. The bottom N bits of the address (the offset within a page) are left unchanged. The upper address bits are the (virtual) page number. The MMU contains a page table which is indexed (possibly associatively) by the page number. Each page table entry (PTE) gives the physical page number corresponding to the virtual one. This is combined with the page offset to give the complete physical address. A PTE may also include information about whether the page has been written to, when it was last used (for a least recently used replacement algorithm), what kind of processes (user mode, supervisor mode) may read and write it, and whether it should be cached. It is possible that no physical memory (RAM) has been allocated to a given virtual page, in which case the MMU will signal a "page fault" to the CPU. The operating system will then try to find a spare page of RAM and set up a new PTE to map it to the requested virtual address. If no RAM is free it may be necessary to choose an existing page, using some replacement algorithm, and save it to disk (this is known as "paging"). There may also be a shortage of PTEs, in which case the OS will have to free one for the new mapping. In a multitasking system all processes compete for the use of memory and of the MMU. Some memory management architectures allow each process to have its own area or configuration of the page table, with a mechanism to switch between different mappings on a process switch. This means that all processes can have the same virtual address space rather than require load-time relocation. An MMU also solves the problem of fragmentation of memory. After blocks of memory have been allocated and freed, the free memory may become fragmented (discontinuous) so that the largest contiguous block of free memory may be much smaller than the total amount. With virtual memory, a contiguous range of virtual addresses can be mapped to several non-contiguous blocks of physical memory. In early designs memory management was performed by a separate integrated circuit such as the MC 68851 used with the Motorola 68020 CPU in the Macintosh II or the Z8015 used with the Zilog Z80 family of processors. Later CPUs such as the Motorola 68030 and the ZILOG Z280 have MMUs on the same IC as the CPU.
  • microwave spectroscopy — the determination of those frequencies of the microwave spectrum that are selectively absorbed by certain materials, providing information about atomic, molecular, and crystalline structure.
  • miguel primo de rivera — Diego [dye-gaw] /ˈdyɛ gɔ/ (Show IPA), 1886–1957, Mexican painter.
  • mind one's p's and q's — to be careful to behave correctly and use polite or suitable language
  • miscarriage of justice — law: wrongful judgement
  • miscellaneous expenses — small expenses of various kinds
  • missing persons bureau — the part of the Police Force dealing with tracing missing people
  • modified american plan — (in hotels) a system of paying a single fixed rate that covers room, breakfast, and one other meal, usually dinner. Abbreviation: MAP.
  • mohammed al-khawarizmi — Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi
  • molecular distillation — a vacuum distillation in which the molecules of the distillate reach the condenser before colliding with one another.
  • monday morning disease — azoturia (def 2).
  • monoammonium phosphate — a white, crystalline, moderately water-soluble compound, NH 4 H 2 PO 4 , used as fertilizer, in fire extinguishers, etc.
  • most significant digit — the digit farthest to the left in a number. Abbreviation: MSD.
  • mother carey's chicken — any of various small petrels, especially the stormy petrel, Oceanites oceanicus.
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